I am a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I am on the 2026–2027 academic job market, and expect to graduate in May 2027. I research topics at the intersection of housing economics, urban economics, public economics, and risk and insurance.
Before graduate school, I was a research assistant in the Regional Analysis Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. I received my B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2019.
Job Market Paper
Sorting Over Wildfire Risk Information (with Sarah Bass)
Abstract
We study how information about climate risk changes household beliefs, housing demand, and residential sorting in equilibrium. We embed a Bayesian model of belief updating into a structural model of neighborhood choice in which households have heterogeneous preferences over housing prices and wildfire risk. We use the introduction of a wildfire risk disclosure policy in California as an information shock that changes information about wildfire risk without changing the underlying physical hazard, allowing us to identify how belief updating affects location choices and housing prices in equilibrium. Our estimates suggest that prior to the disclosure policy, households exhibit substantial uncertainty in their beliefs about neighborhood wildfire risk. We find that the divergence in beliefs about neighborhood risk induced by the disclosure policy is equivalent to the effect of exposure to about 8 wildfire events. Counterfactual simulations that remove the disclosure policy show that this change in beliefs induces substantial re-sorting of households based on their relative levels of sensitivity to wildfire risk: more risk-averse, mortgage-financed buyers shift away from areas newly perceived as higher risk, while less risk-averse buyers, particularly cash buyers and those purchasing homes for non-primary use, sort in. Re-sorting is also supported by general-equilibrium price effects: prices in neighborhoods newly perceived as risky fall relative to neighborhoods believed to be safer. As a result, disclosure reallocates wildfire exposure across households. Our findings show that the provision of wildfire risk information can reshape housing markets and the distribution of climate risk, even when the underlying physical hazard remains unchanged.